This specification relates to generating website scores that are used in search operations in an Internet search engine.
The Internet enables access to a wide variety of resources, such as video or audio files, web pages for particular subjects, book articles, or news articles. A search engine can identify resources in response to a user query that includes one or more search terms or phrases. The search engine ranks the resources based on their relevance to the query and importance and provides search results that link to the identified resources, and orders the search results according to the rank.
A website is one or more resources associated with a domain name, and one or more servers host each website. Websites are maintained by publishers that manage and/or own the websites. Search engines, in addition to evaluating resources alone, may also take into account scores and measurements regarding the website to which the resources belong when scoring the resources for search operations.